Howard Goodall is one of Britain’s best-known composers of choral music, stage musicals, TV and film scores and is also a distinguished music historian and broadcaster. He has composed some of the best-known TV theme tunes of the last 40 years. His choral music has been commissioned to mark many national and international ceremonies and memorials.
Howard’s first West End musical, The Hired Man, based on Melvyn Bragg’s book, opened in the West End in 1984, when he was 24. It has since been performed all over the world and won many international awards. His other West End musicals include Girlfriends (1987), The Kissing-Dance (1998), the dreaming (2001), Love Story (2010), and in 2015-6, Bend it Like Beckham, adapted from Gurinder Chadha’s iconic 2002 film, which was seen by a quarter of a million people at the Phoenix Theatre and has since had Austrian and Canadian premières. Since its London opening, Love Story has been premièred in the USA, The Russian Federation, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, South Korea and Brazil, where it was produced in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympiad. Musicals currently in development include Stunners, with Joanne Harris, which was premièred at London’s Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in 2019.
For the past 30 years he has written and presented his own TV documentary series on the theory and history of music. His books been translated and published in over 20 countries. For his TV series he has been honoured with a BAFTA, an RTS Judges’ Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Education in Broadcasting and over a dozen other international broadcast awards. He was England’s first National Ambassador for Singing and Classic fm’s Composer-in-Residence from 2009 to 2016. He was appointed CBE in 2011 for services to music education.